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A Presentation of the Self-Publishing Model (SPM) as
the Advent of a New Era of Scientific Communication
Author: Nour Ouda, Claus Jacob
Endorsed by: Claus Jacob
Edited by: Ahmad Yaman Abdin and Muhammad Jawad Nasim
This manuscript is being published under the auspices of the Self Publishing Movement (SPM)
to promote the free and unbiased exchange of scientific knowledge for all. The manuscript has
not been refereed in order to protect the originality and to preserve the creativity of the author(s)
and her/his/their ideas. Instead, it has been edited and endorsed by peers to ensure that format
and content both adhere to acceptable international standards. Endorsements, criticism,
comments and debate are always welcome.
The intellectual property rights and copyright of this piece of original work reside with the
author(s) and due credit should be given if this work is being cited.
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Abstract
Traditional scientific dissemination via journals is problematic. It restricts the free exchange of
knowledge due to financial restraints and, because of a subjective reviewing process, often
impinges on authors’ originality. Eventually, important pieces of research are lost, whilst others
are skewed in order to please anonymous referees. The Self-Publishing Movement (SPM)
considers the free and open access to scientific knowledge as a right for all. Under the auspices
of the SPM disseminating and acquiring knowledge is free of charge. The originality and
creativity of authors’ work and ideas are preserved by avoiding the influence of referees. The
standard linguistic and scientific quality of the work can be maintained by peer editors and
endorsers before the dissemination. The overall quality and significance of the scientific
endeavor is evaluated by the entire readership, interactively, through endorsements, objections
and feedback on a free, public platform. The SPM follows the idea that science is a continuous,
interactive social process free for all to participate - and that this process is possible today thanks
to modern IT. The SPM pitches an open debate and endorsements of manuscripts against
refereeing, and their subsequent reads, citations, use and usefulness against rigid and de facto
unrelated impact factors.
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1. Introduction
“Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth,” as Isaac Newton
(1642-1726) has been quoted1, clearly emphasizing that scientists are in a constant endeavor to
uncover the truth about the universe in every aspect of scientific activity, i.e. the context of
discovery, the context of justification and the context of dissemination.
History has focused on the context of discovery, which refers to the process by which a theory
arrives. By the 20th
Century, the attention shifted towards the context of justification, which
involves validating the theory and searching for proofs (as falsification). Nowadays, the focus
has shifted once again to the context of dissemination, which is becoming an important and
integral part of scientific activity. Dissemination refers to the process of publishing approved
theories, which contributes to the growth of science, development of knowledge and pursuit of
truth.
In this thesis, I will consider the significance of publishing for scientists as well as the gradual
changes in the publication system since the initiation of open access movement. I will discuss the
issue of credibility, scrutiny as well as financial intentions associated with the dissemination of
literature.
This thesis will also address the significance of scientific truth and the scientific activity utilized
to render it attainable for scientists. I will probe deeper to define the scientific inquiry,
considering the inductive-deductive patterns. I will then proceed to define falsifiability, which
stems from the logical asymmetry between verification and falsification. Moreover, this study
will discuss the different contexts of scientific activity, i.e. the context of discovery and the
context of justification.
In the subsequent chapter, I will move from the invention and appraisal of theories to their
dissemination. This section will consider the development of scientific communication. In effect,
history reveals that each stage of development was strongly affected by social and technological
advances. Thus, in the epoch of increasing technological advances, effective implementation of
new technology is becoming a challenge.
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Theoretically, scientific truth is a major intention for dissemination of new scientific discoveries.
This raises the question if scientific truths are influenced by dramatic changes in scientific
publishing tools, “especially” in the open access era. Furthermore, I will discuss the onset of
open access publishing and the transition from printed journals to electronic journals, which
represents a huge step towards rapid communication. Two decades after its first appearance in
the late 1990s, the debut of “open access” has opened a door to a new era of publication. It is an
era in which knowledge is shared on a wider scale through the straightforward accessibility of
scientific literature.
Chapter 4 will highlight the scientific publishing practices, which have been affected decisively
by many factors. Firstly, the number of open access journals has surged dramatically over the
last decade. Secondly, the number of scientists is increasing who are under pressure to produce
publications, and hence, are faced with the choice between “publish or perish.” Thirdly, the
mainstays upon which the modern scientific publishing is based are shaken.
These changes in the publishing environment have raised important questions: Are the scientific
truths going to be influenced? How can we maintain scientific authenticity in the context of an
increasing pressure to produce publications?
These questions have fueled debates between proponents and opponents of open access
publication. Some supporters argue that, in open access publishing, there is a mutually beneficial
relationship between authors and readers. Motives of authors to publish in open access journals
have stemmed from their desire to advance knowledge. Altruism, however, has not been the only
reason, career building is a reason as well2. In effect, increasing visibility definitely means
increasing citations, which can enhance an author’s career.
“OA is not a sacrifice for authors who write for impact rather than money. It increases a work’s
visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations, which all convert to career building.”3
(Peter Suber, Open Access, p.16)
On the other hand, there is a fierce criticism on open access publishing practices. Some argue
that, the peer review system is losing its credibility. Besides, digitalization of literature has
increased the burden on reviewers, i.e. there are no limits for pages published per article and no
print costs as well, at least not for the journal: PLoS ONE, which has published more than
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105,000 papers since 20064. In addition to that, some open access journals publish almost
everything “methodologically sound,” regardless of scientific significance.
Manipulation of impact factor values another issue which also needs attention. A journal’s
prestige is affected highly by the citation rates of the published articles, which are traditionally
calculated by Thomson Reuters, although some fake Impact Factor (IF) claims have recently
emerged5. Unfortunately, impact factor is now trickery augmented in and by several ways
6.
Chapter 5 will address the ethical issues regarding the open access-publishing model. How could
scientists in Third World countries afford the article processing charges (APCs)? Is it more
ethical to charge readers or authors?
Developing nations have benefited highly from the removal of barriers by open access
publishing. Scientific results are flowing more than before to less well financed researchers. In
these countries, researchers can access final manuscripts for free, but at the same time, it is hard
for them to publish in open access journals7.
In the proceeding chapter, I will develop my hypothesis and support it with reasons and historical
evidences. I will introduce an alternative Self-publishing Model (SPM), which is cost-neutral,
more rapid, more effective, less biased and in the end more democratic with its own “esteem
factors” for manuscripts, authors and websites.
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2. The role of dissemination in the scientific activity
“Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the
next better one,” as Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) has been quoted8, obviously asserting that
theories are constantly changing, new theories which explain new observations could replace old
theories leading to an increase in knowledge expanding, thus closer approach to the scientific
truth. Is scientific truth, however, approachable? If yes, could it be inevitable and maintained? In
order to answer these fundamental questions, we should discuss the process of scientific inquiry
per se and how to reach a specific theory.
This section addresses the emergence and the development of contexts of scientific activity, i.e.
“The context of discovery and justification” by which scientific inquiry is processed and
achieved. These two terms are often referred to Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953). In the early
years of 20th
Century, a sharp distinction between the two contexts has been created9. Recently,
the interest has shifted to the context of dissemination and its significance for scientific activity.
2.1 The context of discovery
Philosophical reflection on scientific discovery has been intricate in meaning. In its “narrowest”
concept, it could refer to the product of a successful scientific inquiry, or in its “widest” concept,
it could refer to the process of a successful scientific attempt. In the course of the 1930s,
however, the term “discovery” has been mainly referred to its narrowest concept, i.e. it is the
activity which leads to a new ideas or hypotheses, which explain specific data. Thus, it refers to
the purported Eureka Moment. It is a psychological, subjective and non-rational process, which
cannot be subjected to a normative analysis10
. Friedrich Kekulé (1829-1896), for instance, a
German chemist, elucidated the hexagonal structure of benzene. It has been claimed that, Kekulé
arrived at this hypothesis after dreaming of a snake that was trying to bite its own tail11
.
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2.1.1 Scientific reasoning
According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP): “In the early 20th
century, the view
that discovery is or at least crucially involves a non-analyzable creative act of a gifted genius
was widespread but not unanimously accepted. Alternative conceptions of discovery emphasize
that discovery is an extended process, i.e. that the discovery process includes the reasoning
processes through which a new insight is articulated and further developed.”12
Inductive-deductive patterns of scientific inquiry go back to Aristotle (384-322 BC)13
. In
inductive reasoning which is the generalization from observation, premises do not entail the
conclusion, which means the conclusion is probably true. On the contrary, deductive reasoning
moves from true premises to a definitely true conclusion. In effect, deductive reasoning is a
much safer process than inductive reasoning, because if we know that our premises are right
from the beginning, we will guarantee the achievement of a true conclusion. If we reason
inductively, however, we could obtain wrong conclusions. Nevertheless, it is the method that
modern science is using. Scientists obtain their general conclusion from limited data, for
example; Isaac Newton’s principal of universal gravitation, which states that bodies exert a
gravitational attraction on every other body. Obviously, it is impossible for Newton to examine
all bodies in the universe, however, he saw that the principle held true for the planets and the sun
and various sorts moving near the earth’s surface, hence, he concluded inductively that his
principle held true for all bodies14
.
Figure 1. Inductive-deductive reasoning as proposed originally by Aristotle.
General
principles
Specific
instances
Inductive Deductive
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2.2 The context of justification
On the contrary, justification is -in part- a logical process of testing the hypothesis using
scientific methods. “Once the investigator has thought up the hypothesis, by whatever means,
method comes into play in the activity of assembling evidence and accepting only those ideas
that are well supported by the evidence.”15
(Barker and Kitcher 2014, p.15).
Philosophers of science who advocate the “context distinction” argued that philosophy of science
is a normative endeavor and it is concerned entirely with the context of justification, which could
be subjected to normative analysis16
. Logical positivists, for instance, a group of scientists and
philosophers who met in Vienna in the 1920s and early 1930s under the leadership of Moritz
Schlick (1882-1936), strongly advocated the contexts distinction and argued that philosophy of
science is concerned with studying the context of justification17
.
“The early years of the 20th
century witnessed exciting scientific advances, particularly in
physics, which impressed the positivists tremendously. One of their aims was to make philosophy
itself more ‘scientific’, in the hope that this would allow similar advances to be made in
philosophy.”18
(Okasha 2002, p. 79)
2.2.1 Verification, Falsification and Corroboration
Karl Popper (1902-1994), an influential 20th
Century philosopher of science, strongly repudiated
induction activity claiming that scientists only need to use deductive inferences, thus he
substituted induction activity with falsifiability, a demarcating criterion that distinguishes science
from pseudo-science19,20
. Accordingly, in Poppers’ opinion, anthropology, phrenology,
astronomy and psychoanalysis, even Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, are not sciences. Many
questions, however, were raised concerning Popper’s theory of falsifiability indicating that there
is a problem; What if we continue finding negative evidences on theories? What if an alternative
theory couldn’t be found? Is it plausible to give up on a whole theory because of one negative
experiment? Imre Lakatos (1922-1974), a Hungarian-born philosopher of mathematics and
science, who delivered many immense contributions to the philosophy of science, saw that
Popper’s theory is so restrictive since it precludes important theories due to negative
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Core theory
AH
AHAH
AH AH
AH
NAH
observations. According to Popper, any theory which deserves to be scientific should be
empirically falsifiable. Lakatos proposed a radical modification to Popper’s demarcation
between science and pseudo-science, called “Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes”
or MSRP21
. Lakatos did not exclude Popper’s falsifiability totally from his new approach,
however, he diminished its importance. That is, instead of focusing on one falsifiable theory,
which ought to be rejected as soon as it is refuted, he replaced it with a sequence of theories as a
belt surrounding a hard inner core which is characterized to be irrefutable and non-falsified, at
least for the time being. Thus, testing will be directed only on the auxiliary hypothesis and one
negative test result will not refute the entire research programmes, on the other hand, auxiliary
hypothesis could be changed22
.
Popper’s theory of the demarcation criterion stems from his conception of the logical asymmetry
between verification and falsification, as he stated in his book, “The Logic of Scientific
Discovery”:
“My proposal is based upon an asymmetry between verifiability and falsifiability; an asymmetry
which results from the logical form of universal statements. For these are never derivable from
singular statements, but can be contradicted by singular statements.”23
(Popper1968, p.19)
Hence, we conclude that it is logically impossible to conclusively verify a general statement as to
falsify a singular statement from a numerous number of experiments while one experiment can
verify a singular statement and falsify a general one as in Table 1.
Figure 2. Lakatos research programmes. AH: Auxiliary hypothesis NAH: New auxiliary hypothesis.
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Table 1. Asymmetry of Verification and Falsification.
General statement Singular statement
Verification Infinite confirming experiments One confirming experiment
Falsification One counter experiment Infinite counter experiments
According to Popper, theories can never be logically verified. Thus, he holds that, theories can
receive corroboration. That is, if a theory passes a rigors test, it does not indicate that it is true or
it will withstand the next tests. Consequently, a corroborated theory will be temporarily retained
until it is at last falsified24
.
2.3 The context of dissemination
Eventually, after the hypothesis has been generated and subsequently justified, what is the next
step? What if the phases of scientific activity stop there? Knowledge will not improve and it will
ultimately reach a plateau because new results are not being shared among scientists. Hence,
emerges the important question: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it
make a sound? George Berkeley (1685-1753)25
. In other words, are scientific discoveries that are
not published still discoveries or not?
This strongly suggests that, to some extent at least, dissemination of discovery is as important as
the discovery per se. Therefore, publication is essential for scientists, it is proof of the originality
of their findings, a cachet in their scientific career and more importantly, by publication they
render knowledge available to the scientific community, thus, their discoveries become effective.
We conclude that attention should not be confined to the context of discovery and the context of
justification, the context of dissemination should receive some attention as well.
In the next chapter, I will probe deeper in the coinage “The context of dissemination” and
discuss its importance in the scientific field. Moreover, I will take glance on how scientific
communication is shaped and has developed from the beginning and the changes, which it has
passed through until it has reached a stage where it is best reflected by the unfortunate catch-
phrase “publish or perish.”
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3. The History of Scientific Communication
This thesis is concerned with highlighting the important role of technological advancement in
knowledge transfer among scientists starting from the invention of the printing press by Johannes
Gutenberg (1398-1468), in the mid of 15th
Century. In order to understand changes in scientific
communication, I will take a glance on its origin, discussing several achievements in its timeline,
and emphasizing both the significance and the impact of digitalization.
3.1 The “Gutenberg revolution” and the scientific revolution
History reveals that the development of publishing was coinciding with a highly increased rate of
scientific progress. It was just a perfect timing for the Gutenberg revolution to occur in the 15th
Century predating the scientific revolution by two centuries. It is worth mentioning that the role
of printing in the 15th
Century was different from its role in the 17th
Century. That is, it did not
serve as a new knowledge exchanger rather it served in unification and gathering of existing
knowledge. The significant role of printing in scientific communication brightened up in the
scientific revolution era in the 17th
Century. This is the very era of the emergence of modern
sciences, emanation of great advances and initiation of a more professionalized scientific
practice. The scientific revolution soon became an intellectual revolution when scientists began
to transcend the conceptual boundaries between translating and combining the ancient
knowledge. They also started to observe, investigate, and to discover new science26
. Loet
Leydesdorff (b.1948) has described the role of scientific communication with respect to
scientific truth: “scientific communications are expected to search for truth, while the truth is no
longer given as in (religious) belief systems.”27
(Leydesdorff, 2003)
In the course of the 17th
Century there was an intense and competitive endeavor to find a fast and
spacious way for scientific communication to cope with the increasing rate of scientific
discoveries during the scientific revolution and onwards. Scientists were in a constant explicit
tendency to find a method of communication with their fellows all over the world in order to
share their new research results and to become instantaneously aware of new scientific
discoveries. As the information scientist John Mackenzie Owen stated in his well-known book,
the “Scientific Article in the Age of Digitization”:
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“It has been common practice since the 17th
century to think about science as an ‘open’
communicative system based on the widest possible diffusion of ideas and research findings,
allowing for their unrestricted scrutiny, criticism and debate. This implies some mechanism that
ensures the proliferation and exchange of ideas, and the universal availability of research
outcomes irrespective of time and place. Such a mechanism has to be seen as an organized
system for scientific communication that performs specific functions (e.g. distribution, access,
preservation), and that also operates as a social system in that whoever is excluded from the
communicative system cannot act as a member of the scientific community.”28
(Owen 2007, p.31)
3.2 Letters and traveling as a mode of communication
Despite the significant role of printing in communication among scientists, it was a slow process.
As John Owen stated in his book “Scientific Article in the Age of Digitization”: “Since it
required a considerable amount of time to create a significant body of data in printed form, it is
understandable that the print ‘revolution’ in the domain of science was a relatively slow
process.” 29
(Owen 2007, p.33)
Therefore, a quicker means of communication were required to cope with the increasing rate of
scientific development. Interestingly, letters, traveling and face-to-face meetings played an
essential role in accelerating the scientific communication among scientists all over the world30
.
3.3 The establishment of scientific societies:
Scientific discoveries, investigation and communication have become institutionalized after the
foundation of the scientific societies such as Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina
in 1652, which was founded by four physicians, namely Johann Laurentius Bausch (1605-1665),
Johann Michael Fehr (1610-1688), Georg Balthasar Metzger (1632-1687) and Georg Balthasar
Wohlfarth (1607-1674) 31
. The Royal Society in London was established in November 1660 by
Christopher Wren (1632-1723), Robert Boyle (1627-1691) and John Wilkins (1614-1672) and
chartered by Charles II in 1662 as the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge.
The Académie des Sciences in Paris came just a few years later, as a group of scholars gathering
fortnightly in the king’s library in the rue Vivienne, and it was formally founded by the politician
Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683) in 1666. This was the first step for the beginning of an
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important movement that changed the way how scientists communicate with each other. Since
then, this movement has grown dramatically. Many national institutions were formed that
brought together the scientists of the enlightenment, as described in Table 232
.
Table 2. Timeline of some national scientific societies
Date Institution
1635 Académie française
1652 Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina
1660 Royal Society of London
1666 Académie des sciences in Paris
1683 Accademia dei Dissonanti di Modena
1725 St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences
1739 Royal Swedish Academy
1783 Royal Society of Edinburgh
1785 Royal Irish Academy
1808 Koninklijk Instituut van Wetenschappen, Letterkunde en Schoone Kunsten in
Amsterdam
In this era, science was in a massive need for institutions, which gather scientists from different
fields and places who are interested in different fields of science. As John Owen defined the
Royal Society:
“A new type of institution that would bring together people both from within the university and
outside, from various fields of science, and with a consciously expansive, outward-looking
approach to the organization of scientific activity, as exemplified in endeavors ranging from
novel forms of publication to scientific expeditions in the modern sense.”33
(Owen 2005, p.35)
Unquestionably, scientific societies have performed many significant roles in the improvement
of science; scientific knowledge became more open than before by allowing sharing of new ideas
and discoveries, acceleration of the dissemination of knowledge by the usage of printing and
periodical publication and by eventually archiving the new observations and findings.
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3.4 The establishment of scientific journals
There were many achievements in the early years of the Royal Society, like Robert Hooke’s
(1635-1703) book “Micrographia” and the first issue of Philosophical Transactions, which
began life in March 166534
. It was in fact initiated and financed by the Society’s first secretary,
Henry Oldenburg (1619-1677). This development is regarded as an important step towards
formal scientific communication. The contents of the journal in its early years were mainly book
reviews and new findings and observations from natural philosophers. In 1752, the Society took
over the financial responsibility for the journal. Since then, the contents became more closely
related to the contents of the Society’s meetings35
.
Two months before the inauguration of Philosophical Transactions, in January 1665, the first
issue of the Journal des sçavans (later renamed Journal des savants) had been published. It was
a private enterprise of Denis de Sallo (1626-1669), and consisted of reports on new scientific
discoveries and meetings as well as reviews of newly published books. Just a few similar
projects were published by both scientific societies and private enterprises by the late of 17th
Century. Over the course of the 18th
Century, however, there was a marked increase in the
number and periodicity of scientific journals with over 422 titles appearing in the period of 1750-
179036
.
The 19th
Century has witnessed a remarkable increase in scientific publishing both in terms of
the number of published articles and journal titles37
. Furthermore, it was the period of the
emergence of numerous specialist disciplinary journals. The Philosophical Transactions, for
instance, became divided into two series ‘A’ and ‘B’ in 1887, for the physical and biological
sciences, respectively38
. Various prominent scientific journals were established in the last
decades of the 19th
Century and are still being published today. Nature, for example, which was
established in 1869 in London by the scientist Norman Locker (1836-1920)39
and its rival
Science which was founded in 1880 by the New York journalist John Michels in cooperation
with Thomas A. Edison (1847-1931)40
.
Studying the history of some “elite” journals reveals that they have and often still occupy an
eminent place inside the scientific community. Moreover, they were the forum where scientists
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share, debate and object or advocate scientific discoveries. “Can journals influence science?” this
question is the title for a “News and views” editorial written by John Maddox (1925-2009), the
editor of Nature for 22 years from 1966–1973 and 1980–199541
. He emphasizes the significant
role journals play in science when he stated:
“Which holds that the scientific literature is and should be a passive means of communication-a
mirror held up to the face of research in which people other than its authors can discover what is
happening in laboratories the world over. That is, of course, an idealization which is far from
the truth.”42
(Baldwin 2015, p.228)
3.5 The digitalization of scientific journals
It is unquestionable that new technologies can drastically influence communication practices,
which consequently influence the progression of science. The final decades of the 20th
Century
have witnessed an upheaval on the scientific communication level, “the digitalization of the
scientific journals”, i.e. the evolution from ink journals to digital texts. This tremendous
innovation constituted a prominent event in the context of scientific publishing. It has been
suggested that digitalization of publication can be called “paradigm shift” in the traditional sense
of the famous word Thomas Kuhn (1922-1966) coined43
. It is worth mentioning that the
phenomena of electronic journals have begun in the late 1980s.
3.5.1 The electronic-only journals
Historically, electronic journals or “e-journals” have passed through several stages. The initial
stage was electronic-only journals, i.e. with the absence of printed versions, such as New
horizons in adult education, which was established in 1987 by Michael Ehringhaus and Bird
Stasz of Syracuse University. Another peer reviewed electronic-only journal is The Online
Journal of Current Clinical Trial, which was launched in September 1991, and has been
described as the first peer reviewed electronic journal in medicine44
. It was a result of
cooperation between the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the
Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)45
.
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Electronic mailing lists in the 1980s, undoubtedly, have served science effectively by
accelerating communication among scientists. Scientists used to send their new results before
publication to their colleagues. This was somehow problematic, however, as the increasing
number of preprints was creating an uncontrollable number of mailing list posts. The foundation
of xxx.lanl.gov, the Los Alamos preprint server in August 1991 by the physicist Paul Ginsparg
(b.1955) has tackled this problem by allowing physicists to upload their papers in a non-peer
reviewed fashion46
.
3.5.2 The online-journals
The second stage started around 1997 when existing printed journals started to publish an
electronic parallel counterpart, the “online-journals.” The printed and the digital format are
almost in all cases identical. Differences, however, can be formed in the improved functionality
level, i.e. email alerts and search function47
, and in speeding up access to the journal.
The growth of electronic journals has changed the way scientists communicate with each other
and the way they comprehend literature in their field. This was definitely a progression, which
facilitates scientists’ interaction with science. As Melinda Baldwin stated in “Making Nature”:
“The ability to search for articles by topics and keywords and access them online has changed
the way most scientists interact with the literature in their field. It is far more common for
scientists to read a handful of individual articles from different journals than to browse through
a full issue of a single journal.”48
(Baldwin 2015, p. 234)
3.5.3 The open access movement
The third stage is the establishment of the PubMed Central around 2000 by the US National
Institute of Health (NIH). It is an open access repository, where researchers could post papers
resulting from government-funded research49
. As Melinda Baldwin described this development:
“Some open-access pressure comes from government whose taxpayers fund research through
organizations such as the US National Science Foundation or the UK Medical Research
Council; if taxpayers funded the work, many argue, they should be able to read the resulting
research.”50
(Baldwin 2015, p.236)
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The open access movement, afterwards, developed from using repositories of already published
papers to publishing original papers. The establishment of Public Library of Science (PLoS) in
2000 by three scientists, Patrick Brown (b.1954), Michael Eisen (b.1967) and Harold Varmus
(b.1939), was the first step of this development51
. PLoS Biology was the first open access journal
in 2003. After a year, they established PLoS Medicine. PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS
Genetics, and PLoS Pathogens followed this in 2005. PLoS ONE, however, which was
established in 2006, is the organization’s most original and significant publication52
. A statement
printed in an “open letter” addressed to the scientific community in 2001 clarified the intentions
of the PLoS establishment:
“We support the establishment of an online public library that would provide the full contents of
the published record of research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a
freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form. Establishment of this public library would
vastly increase the accessibility and utility of the scientific literature, enhance scientific
productivity, and catalyze integration of the disparate communities of knowledge and ideas in
biomedical sciences.”53
Thenceforth, the open access publishing movement started to grow steadily producing a dramatic
influence on scientific publishing54
. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals
(DOAJ), the four-year period from 2009 to 2013 has witnessed a sharp increase in the number of
open access journals. In 2009, the number was 5,000 journals and then went up to reach 8,847
journals in 2013 with an ever-growing tendency55
.
Publishers of subscription journals felt that their business was extremely threatened by the
emergence of the new publishing model. Thus rather than fighting it, they decided to adapt and
compete. They invented the hybrid journals, where they use to turn the published article open
access after collecting extra fees. This situation is defined as “double dipping”; gaining money
from both readers and authors56
. For example, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science (PNAS), if authors pay $1350, their papers can be open accessed while still being
published in the prestigious journal, which itself charges a significant subscription fee57
.
Unsurprisingly, the open access movement has acquired the support of scientists. Steven Harnad
(b.1945) a cognitive scientist, for example, publishes most of his research as open access.
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Pay Read
Subscription-based journals
Pay Publish
Open access journals
According to Melinda Baldwin, in 2001 he stated that58
“Online journals and archives had the
potential to “free the literature” and enable scientists to share their work with the entire
research community, not just those scientists whose institutions subscribe to a particular
journal.”59
(Baldwin 2015, p.237)
3.6 The economics behind the open access movement
So far, this chapter has been a mere historical description of scientific communication. This
section will address the academic publishing business and look at the impacts of the open access
movement from an economical standpoint.
Academic publishing is a very profitable business, generating $9 billion in revenue annually,
according to Outsell, Inc. a marketing firm focused on the scientific publishing industry.
Elsevier, for instance, had a revenue around $3 billion in 2012. Thus, we can conclude that
publishers of subscription journals generate billions of dollars from subscription fees60
.
Open access publishing has shifted the equation from “pay-read,” which is the equation that
traditional journals are based on, to “pay-publish.” The open access business model is funded by
article-processing charges (APCs). For example, PLoS ONE charges $1,320 APC, whereas PeerJ
offers to publish an unlimited number of papers per author for a one-time fee of $29961
. Hence,
we can conclude that ‘readers’ are the main target for subscription- based journals, while open
access journals aim towards authors.
A key problem of subscription-based journals is to cover topics which will attract a sufficient
number of readers. This is well documented for the journal Academy, founded in 1869 as Nature,
a meanwhile leading journal. Charles Appleton (1841-1879), the editor of Academy, desired to
Figure 3. Changes in the equation after the invention of OA.
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attract more readers by adding coverage of the recent work in literature and philosophy. The first
issue was published under the title The Academy: A Monthly Record of Literature, Learning,
Science and Art. In 1873, however, the number of readers was not as expected and the journal
was not profitable. Thus, the editor decided to change the content of the journal by decreasing
the scientific content in favor of more philosophy and literature62
.
Open access journals, like any business, aspire to increase their income using techniques in
soliciting authors. One of the techniques applied frequently is marketing. The International
Journal of Sciences: Basic and Applied Research (IJSBAR), for instance, offers rapid decision
starting from the date of submission, which takes approximately 21 days63
. Another example is
the Planta Medica Journal, a sister journal of the traditional “Planta Medica,” which has been
launched as an open access journal in 2014. It proposes a new way of marketing by inventing an
unprecedented slogan “pay what you want” in the beginning of 2016, and for one year64
. Furthermore, this journal annually rewards the most promising, innovative paper as judged by
the journals’ editors and based on the scientific quality and the interest that the paper has
received from within the scientific community.
Date Events
Around 1440 The invention of printing press by Johannes Gutenberg
1478 The first book was printed at Oxford University
1660 The foundation of the Royal Society in London
1665 The first issue of a scientific journal was launched “Journal des savants”
1665 The first issue of the scientific journal related to the Royal Society secretary
“Philosophical Transactions” was launched
1666 The foundation of the Académie des Sciences in Paris
19th century The emergence of numerous specialist disciplinary journals
1987 The first e-only journals emerge
1997 Electronic versions of printed journals
2000 Open access journals
Table 3. Timeline of important events in scientific communication.
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Obviously, scientific journals have succeeded to become an important means of publication and
communication among scientists. Unsurprisingly, modern technology has tipped the scales and
changed the perspective of the scientific community towards scientific communication.
We can conclude that focusing on the profits in some journals has converted the context of
dissemination into a socio-economic activity. To go beyond a mere historical description of
prominent events, I will define in the following chapter the most important practices that form
the infrastructure of the scientific publishing and the changes that they have passed through.
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4. Pillars of publishing practices
When the infrastructure is shaken, everything collapses. In this section, I will shed light on two
important practices that form the infrastructure of the scientific publishing domain, i.e. the peer
review system and the impact factor of scientific journals. I will discuss their history,
importance, and criticism. I will evaluate if this infrastructure is shaken or still safe for the
decades to come. Afterwards, I will argue for an alternative approach to dissemination that may
protect scientific publishing from corruption, cronyism and eventually collapse.
Undoubtedly, scientific publishing is part and parcel of the scientific process per se, which
serves as a quality control guardian and knowledge disseminator65
, thus, it can significantly
influence the progression of science. This can only occur if, however, the academic publishing
process is achieved to the fullest. There is no denying that there have been many endeavors to
evaluate and therefore, upgrade scientific papers. One method of evaluation is pre-publication
scrutinizing of scientific papers by peer reviewers who have the adequate expertise in the
specific field. Another “seal of quality” results from calculating the impact factor of scientific
journals that are listed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) by Thomson Reuters66
.
4.1 The peer review system between the past and the present
Peer review, which constitutes a pivotal mechanism of the scientific publishing process and the
quality assurance of modern scientific literature, has passed through several changes according to
the development of scientific communication from traditional scientific journals to online
publishing. In order to understand these changes we should go back to the commencement of this
system.
4.1.1 The history of the peer review process
Many people may assume that the peer review process with all its formalized and marshaled
procedure was implanted at the same time as the establishment of the first scientific journals,
such as The Journal des Sçavans in Paris and Philosophical Transactions in London in 1665.
These assumptions are incorrect and stem from a misinterpretation of the editorial practices67
.
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Surprisingly, a serious pursue of the history of scientific journals in general and especially
Philosophical Transactions discloses that a lot of peer review proceedings as we recognize today
happened at that time but in a different way. At that time, it was mainly the editors decision what
to publish in the periodical and what not. Sometimes, however, editors sought for help in order to
test the quality and the suitability of manuscripts and to judge whether it will be or will not be an
adequate material for the scientific journal. This approach was the case for about one century
until the middle of the 18th
Century (1752) when the Philosophical Transactions editorial came
under the accountability of the Royal Society. Henceforth the submission and evaluation process
became less opaque, more organized and, most importantly, less biased by the creation of the
committee of papers68
.
It is worth noticing that William Whewell (1794-1866), a Cambridge professor and philosopher
of science, proposed the practice of peer review in 1831 to the Royal Society of London. To join
every article with a report before publishing, he thought this could increase publicity of science,
and since then it became a crucial part of the publishing system of the Royal Society69
.
Thenceforth, other learned societies, such as the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Linnean
Society of London started to implement a similar process. The presence of the committee along
with an extensive report strategy has served as a potent control mechanism in order to protect
scientific literature from fraud. In contrast, it slowed down the dissemination and sharing process
of new research findings. Ultimately, most of the non-affiliated journals incorporated this
refereeing process in the 20th
Century70
.
For the prestigious journal Nature, for instance, the external refereeing was not mandatory until
the editor David Davis (b.1939) took over the editorship position in 197371
. One of his major
goals, as he stated, was “getting the refereeing system beyond reproach.”72
His predecessors
Lionel Brimble (1904-1965) and Arthur Gale (1895-1978) had absolutely no problem publishing
submitted papers from scientists they trusted without peer review. Their successor Sir John
Maddox (1925-2009) followed that manner in reviewing as well.73
Publishing without refereeing may be considered scourge in the modern publishing era, yet there
have been many magnificent manuscripts and scientific milestones had not been submitted to the
peer review process and few people showed denunciation. In 1953, for instance, James Waston
(b.1928) and Francis Crick (1916-2004) submitted a paper to Nature describing the DNA
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structure, during the Brimble and Gale period of editorship. Interestingly, this paper was
published without going through the peer review process. Another example is the “periodicity”
paper by David Raup (1933-2015), a member of the National Academy of Science (NAS). The
paper was published in the venerable Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),
without being refereed74
.
This indicates that a scientific journal could obtain and maintain a significant standing in the
scientific community and be with a respected reputation even when editors usually eschewed the
peer review process.
Table 4 summarizes the progression of academic review and how it has evolved over the last 300
years75
.
1665 The Philosophical Transactions created by Henry Oldenburg didn’t use the
referee system 1699 France’s Royal Academy of Science founded by Louis XIV
1752 The establishment of the Committee of Papers to vote on what to publish
1831 The proposal from a Cambridge professor William Whewell to the Royal Society
of London to commission public reports on manuscripts 1833 The reports have become private and anonymous
1973 External refereeing becomes mandatory in Nature
1991 The invention of xxx.lanl.gov Later relocated to the web at arXiv.org
2006 PLoS ONE an open access journal that focus on technical soundness of papers,
leaves the assessment of their impact to readers
2007 Open peer review system by EMBO Journal, the Frontiers series and BMJ Open
4.1.2 The bright side of publishing “anything”
The quality, singularity and the scientific importance of a submitted manuscript, as the history
shows, have been highly important in the editorial process. A throwback to the history reveals
that dissemination of knowledge has become more controlled and formalized. For instance,
manuscripts that lack novelty and scientific prominence are rejected immediately. In short, they
proved that properly accomplished science deserves proper dissemination. Obviously, the
platform has been slumped gradually and standards for publishing have been changed.
Table 4. Timeline of the peer review system.
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Nowadays, the peer reviewers of some journals do review, mostly for soundness and no longer
for novelty or significance. In fact, they are throwing the onus on the reader’s side to decide
whether the scientific articles that have been published have a significant impact on the scientific
literature or not. “The journal’s peer review process focuses on the technical soundness of
papers leaving the assessment of their impact and importance to the scientific community,” a
statement found on the FEBS open bio web page. Interestingly, PLOS ONE, Peerj and Biology
Open are open access peer reviewed journals which are following the same policy.
There are, of course, also examples where many journals have accepted manuscripts for
publication without screening either evaluation, which results in a potential negative impact on
the scientific community. During the late 1960s, for instance, the polywater subject triggered a
controversy among the scientific community. In fact, the Soviet scientist Nikolai Fedyakin
claimed to have discovered a new form of water with a higher density, a very low freezing point,
and a very high boiling point. Not surprisingly, it grabbed the attention of the press. Science, for
example, published an article about polywater’s unique characteristics on the 27th
of June 196976
.
As early as 1970, however, concerns arose among the scientific community. Scientists started to
investigate and scrutinize this new form of water. Finally, in 1973, it turned out that polywater
was just normal water contaminated with impurities from laboratory equipment77
.
Figure 4. A representation of polywater at the molecular level.
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On the other hand, stern peer review is well known for the danger of mistakenly rejecting rather
than accepting. Indeed many Nobel Prize papers were rejected when submitted the first time in
scientific journals. Nature rejected Hans Krebs’s paper that describes the citric acid cycle in
1937, however, its author won the Nobel Prize in 1953. As a matter of fact, Nature had even
warned the biochemist about the delay in publishing that might occur in case he decides to wait
and not send it to another periodical78
.
Svante Arrehnius (1859-1927), a Nobel Prize laureate, had a similar anecdote but within a
different scenario. In 1884 his professors at Uppsala University, Per Theodor Cleve and Tobias
Thalén, underestimated and fiercely criticized his doctoral dissertation, which consisted of 150
pages on electrolytic conductivity. Nonetheless, he earned the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his
dissertation in 190379
.
An editorial was published in Nature, in 2003, admitting the obliquity of judgments and
underestimation of some Nobel Prize papers. They formed the unarguable faux pas in the
journal’s history80
. For instance, Pavel Cherenkov’s (1904-1990) paper, “visible radiation
produced by electrons moving in a medium with velocities exceeding that of light” was rejected
by Nature in June 1937, however, accepted by Physical Review81
.
Apparently, the scientific community is not always in coherence with peer reviewers with regard
to many papers that earned the Nobel Prize despite rejection by peer reviewers. Many people
argued that, in spite of the great benefits from applying a scrutinizing peer review, there are
disadvantages that trigger the controversy about these practices. Unfortunately, it is hard to find
an invincible system devoid of any errors. This confronts us with an important question:
Is peer review the only system to keep science safe from roguery and preserve the reputation of
the scientific literature from pathological science?
4.1.3 The peer review system between proponents and opponents
The peer review process is being recently highly criticized for its disability of maintaining the
integrity of research. According to Richard Smith, a former editor-in-chief of the British Medical
Journal, “Peer review is a sacred cow that is ready to be slain” and in his opinion, it should be
swept away. This is what he stated in the Royal Society’s conference on the 20th
of April 2015,
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which discussed the future of scholarly scientific communication82
. Apparently, Dr. Smith
strongly opposed the practice of peer review, accusing it of being time wasting, expensive and
based on faith, not evidence. Moreover, he admitted that the real peer reviewer is the scientific
community. In light of this, John Ioannidis most cited paper in 2005, which was published in
PloS Medicine “why most published research findings are false” shows that flawed research is
most likely to be published by elite journals, as novel research is what they are explicitly looking
for83
. Possibly, their ultimate goal is to attract more subscribers and to grab the readers’ attention.
Dr. Aileen Fyfe, a reader in modern British history at the University of St Andrews, opposed Dr.
Smith’s description of peer review as “sacred cow.” She countered: “Peer review is often thought
of as ancient and unchanging, but it is neither – and it shouldn’t be treated as a sacred cow.”
Moreover, she accentuated the critical role that the peer review is playing recently as a prevailing
practice in scientific communication84
.
4.2 Metrics of impact and value
4.2.1 The impact factor: a metric between influence and prestige
The reputation of the scientific journal has been the indicator of a trustable and worthy science. It
has been the measurement of author’s scientific eligibility. It is calculated using a variety of
metrics; the most famous one is the impact factor, which is an indicator of journal citedness. The
idea was firstly mentioned in Science magazine in 1955, mentioning the citation index history85
.
“Citation Analysis as a tool in journal evaluation,” was also published in Science in 1972 and
eventually grasped editors’ attention86
.
Unfortunately, people misinterpreted the main reason for its invention, as was expected from its
inventor, “I expected it to be used constructively while recognizing that in the wrong hands it
might be abused,” stated Eugene Garfield87
. Recently, the impact factor has been mistakenly
interpreted as a metric to measure researchers’ quality and excellence. Moreover, authors are not
any more acknowledged by their good papers. The visibility of their papers will increase if they
are published in a high-ranking journal and their career will be affected by this. Clearly, editors
are using several ways to manipulate the impact factor, such as pressuring authors to cite papers
from the same journal, or increasing the number of review articles, thus, the journal’s impact
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Citationimpact
Article level
Journal level
Author level
How often an article is cited
in other articles
Journal impact factor
H-index
factor will be inflated88
. In addition to the editorial trickeries, some journals apply misleading
metrics which can augment the “correct” impact factor89
. The World Journal of Pharmacy and
Pharmaceutical Sciences (WJPPS), for instance, uses the Science Journal Impact Factor (SJIF)
as its own impact factor. In 2015, this journal has an SJIM of 6.64 which is considered very high
especially if one “compares” it with the “official” IF from Thomson Reuter90
. The OMICS
Publishing Group is a publisher of open access journals which publishes around 700 journals.
Theses journals use an “individual” method in calculating the impact factor, i.e. the impact factor
for 2015 is calculated by dividing the average number of citations during 2015 by the number of
articles published in 2013 and 201491
, whereas the official calculation of the impact factor from
Thomson Reuter for the previous case is different. It should be calculated by taking the number
of citations in 2013 and 2014 from articles that were published in 2013 and 2014 dividing by the
total number of articles published in that same journal in 2013 and 201492
.
Figure 5. Levels of citation impact.
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4.2.2 Scopus Journal Metrics
Scopus®
is a fairly respectable bibliographic database comprising abstracts and citations of peer-
reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. It is owned by
Elsevier and characterized by its profundity of coverage with the full database reaching back to
196693
. Scopus®
has created its own evolving basket of various metrics at different levels, i.e.
journal, article and author levels. On the 8th
of December 2016, Scopus has launched CiteScoreTM
metrics94, a family consisting of eight metrics as comprehensive indicators at the journal impact
level. CiteScore TM
metrics are: CiteScore, CiteScore Tracker, CiteScore Percentile, CiteScore
Quartiles, CiteScore Rank, Citation Count, Document Count and Percentage Cited.
CiteScore itself, which is the first metric of the CiteScoreTM
metrics mentioned above, is
distinguished by being a robust metric, which its method of calculating the citations differs from
Thomson Reuter’s method, i.e. CiteScore metric has a three-year citation window as a
compromise between the two years and the five years. Besides, both the numerator and the
denominator include all document types indexed by Scopus, i.e. articles, editorials, letters, etc.
Consequently, manipulation will be more difficult95.
4.2.3 Altmetrics: non-traditional filter
The expansion of academic literature and the increasing number of manuscripts has prompted
scholars to rely on metrics to select the most relevant and trustworthy manuscripts from the
others. Undoubtedly, there have been many attempts to improve alternative metrics for assessing
the impact and value of academic research, with focus mainly on the authors and/or articles. For
example, altmetrics represents a “non-traditional metrics” invented as an alternative to more
traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and H-index. The term altmetrics was
proposed in 2010 as a generalization of article level metrics. Altmetrics depends on online
scholarly tools in its filtration method. They are different from journal impact factor, which does
not reflect the impact of the article itself. Moreover, it is different from citation metrics which
reflects only cited and peer reviewed work96
. CiteScore TM
and Altmetrics categories metrics are
summarized in Tables 5 and 697
, respectively.
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The “Academic”
reward
The activity of the reviewer is reflected by the reviewer index, which is
calculated by accumulated points, that is for each review performed the
reviewer will receive one point. This is an indicator of the industrious
work of the reviewers
The “tangible”
rewards
Reviewers can earn credits and the vision is to convert those credits to
“tangible” rewards such as discounts on publishing fees, free subscription
to journals or real cash.
4.2.4 Peer review metrics
“Several metrics have been developed to appraise and quantify the work of authors, articles and
journals. Unfortunately, no attention has been given to peer-reviewers and their work. No
metrics and no rewards exist to recognize and reward their performance. Peer review is a
crucial phase in the process of publication for journals and publishers.”98
This sentence can be
found on a website called Reviewercredits (https://reviewercredits.com/intro.php), which has
been co-founded by two friends who are professors at the University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy.
What is interesting, though, the rewards that the website aims to provide to appreciate reviewers
are: the “academic” reward and the “tangible” reward, as defined by Table 7 below:
1. CiteScore
2. CiteScore Tracker
3. CiteScore Percentile
4. CiteScore Quartiles
5. CiteScore Rank
6. Citation Count
7. Document Count
8. Percentage Cited
Viewed HTML views and PDF downloads
Saved Storing and referencing of articles in
online tools such as Mendeley Discussed Twitter, Wikipedia, science blogs
Cited The formal citation of an article in other
articles Recommended The formal endorsement of a paper, e.g.
F1000Prime
Table 7. Peer-reviewers’ rewards.
Table 6. Categories of Altmetrics. Table 5. CiteScore metrics.
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It is reasonable to assume that the creation of such a website reflects the presence of profound
problems in the refereeing system, which has been somewhat “hidden” in the past, with
detrimental effects on the authors as well as reviewers themselves.
4.3 Ethics in the publishing domain
4.3.1 The nonprofit organization COPE
Similar to the other contexts of scientific activity, dissemination of knowledge is based on trust
and honesty. Thus, the presence of organizations that protect publication ethics is significant to
reassure the existence of trustworthy journals. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is a
forum for editors and publishers of peer reviewed journals to discuss all aspects of publication
ethics. A small group of medical journal editors in the UK established COPE in 1997. They have
been concerned about misconduct in publication. Today COPE has 10.000 members worldwide
from all academic fields. This nonprofit organization promotes integrity in scholarly publishing.
It provides editors and publishers with advice if and when they face certain problems, as well as
criteria to help authors in assessing journals99
.
4.3.2 Beall list
Jeffery Beall is an academic librarian and a researcher at the University of Colorado in Denver
who has coined the term “predatory publishing.” After noticing the increasing number of spam
emails sent to him prompting him to publish in certain journals or joining editorial boards. Beall
became fascinated by the grammatical mistakes in most of the emails. Therefore, in 2010 he
created a Beall’s list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access
publishers. In 2012, he invented his own criteria in evaluating publishers. According to Beall,
2012 was the year when predatory journals exploded.100
Curiously, the Beall list was taken
offline on the 15th
of January 2017. A spokeswoman for the University of Colorado declared that
it was Beall’s “personal decision.”101
To sum up, flaws of both methods (peer review system and impact factor) are well documented.
According to Dr. Richard Price, the founder and the CEO of Academia.edu102
: “It is worth
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mentioning that any credibility metric in any domain is going to be gamed the journal publishing
system is subject to this as much as anything else.” These flaws alongside with the scientific
results that are constrained unless researchers pay, non-surprisingly, have forced academics to
search for alternatives. Moreover, the next chapter will discuss many ethical questions concerned
with scientists in the developing countries. Is it ethical to sell a scientific discovery? Should
knowledge be oriented and/or directed to certain people? How can scientists in the developing
nations participate in the progress and progression of science if they are unable to pay?
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5. Open access and developing countries
The issue we have studied so far, the open access movement and its impact in some ways, on
scientific communication, clearly shows that open access has gained extravagant publicity. It has
returned the process of scientific publishing to its origin: disseminating knowledge worldwide.
This has occurred by the removal of barriers, such as the price barrier, which are hindering
scientists from accessing recently published research. The presence of such barriers can affect
science negatively, especially in developing nations. Firstly, researchers cannot be updated with
the newest research findings. Secondly, entrepreneurs cannot innovate. Thirdly, doctors will be
less qualified due to the obstacles they are facing to access the latest medical research. Finally,
the “brain drain” syndrome, which is a consequence of the migration of academics and
researchers from developing countries to more developed countries due to the lack of adequate
funded institutions and libraries, will continue to increase103
.
According to The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and
Humanities, “the mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is
not made widely and readily available to society.”104 (Berlin Declaration, 2003)
Advocates of the open access movement have strongly argued that all scientists all over the
world should freely access publicly funded research. Unsurprisingly, researchers from
developing countries are the most beneficiaries from this movement, due to the lack of financial
resources which support academic institutions and afford subscription fees. Most libraries in sub-
Saharan Africa have not subscribed to any journal for years. The Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, has the best-funded research library in India, yet its annual library budget is just $2.2
million105
.
Many voluntary ventures have been formed with the same vision of disseminating knowledge
equally to all people all over the world. EIFL (electronic information for libraries), for instance,
is a non-profit organization that works with libraries to enable access to knowledge in developing
and transition economy countries in Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America. Those kinds
of organizations have enabled billions of people in the developing countries to reap the benefits
of the digital technology by assisting them to overcome obstacles, such as the high subscription
costs of scholarly journals106
.
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It is widely acknowledged that the flow of knowledge and the increasing availability of new
scientific results achieved by the open access model have led scientists in the developing
countries to become more effective members in their respective scientific fields. Open access has
widened the scope of the scientific community by encouraging the contribution of new and
diverse minds107
. The purpose of the invention of open access has clearly been defined in the
Budapest Open Access Initiative conference that was launched by the open society institute in
2002:108
109
“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented
public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of
their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The
new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic
distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access
to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.”
It is so obvious that it hardly needs arguing for, that the open access movement has offered
remarkable benefits to researchers in the whole world and especially to those in the developing
countries where most of the institutions are professionally impoverished. Open access has
provided equality in accessing knowledge irrespectively of where they live. Unsurprisingly, there
is a lack of awareness and misunderstanding of the presence of such initiative. Educating
academics and librarians in developing nations about the presence and importance of open access
and convincing institutes and libraries to adopt open access could tackle this problem easily.
Yet there are still other ethical questions which have arisen from the open access movement.
Hence, there are serious ethical issues concerning the situation of authors in developing nations.
Are they going to be capable of affording the APCs of the open access journals? How can they
participate in knowledge progression while their papers are constrained behind publishing
barriers? Those and similar ethical questions have rendered the open access movement a topic of
major debate among scientists all over the world. Decreasing the APCs for authors in developing
countries could solve this problem, but who will compensate for that?
This “asymmetry” between being able to access articles for free but being unable now to pay the
publishing fees may even increase injustice. In the era of “publish or perish,” is it not legitimate
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for an author to pay her or his way to publications in expensive, high Impact Factor (IF)
journals? Thus, nothing has been gained and some issues may even have taken a turn to the
worse. Ideally, both authoring and accessing science need to be free which is impossible as long
as editors, journals, websites, etc. have to be involved.
In the end, publishing is not for free and someone has to pay. If this is not the readers,
government or a sponsor, then it must be the author.
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Peer review
Self-publishing
Journals
Scientific society
Exchange of information
6. Hypothesis: Self-publishing model (SPM)
Eventually remains the question how to maintain quality in the sense of ensuring the validity of
the published data, and how to tackle ethical problems related to such kinds of publication, for
instance, false publications, manufactured data, paying for science, etc. By pushing the open
access concept to the limit, scientists would simply publish their data on their own devices, for
instance, on an internet platform of their choice such as their society, university, institution or
even personal website. The last choice, however, could require some caution. Creators of such
individual websites could easily fake science and papers and individual websites would not be
homogeneous. In contrast, platforms such as ResearchGate®
enable their members to upload their
papers (which have been published already in journals), they allow anyone to communicate with
other members and to follow their activities. Thus, a ResearchGate®
-like system could tackle this
problem, yet would differ from ResearchGate in one crucial aspect: authors could upload their
unrefereed papers.
Such a free exchange would reflect any civilian society, whereby the scientific community
would depend on free and rapid exchange of information. Nowadays we do not need to wait for
some news portal to publish information; instead, various news channels are open to everybody.
Just like a variety of scientific news channels would be available to the scientific community,
leaving it to that very community to decide about relevance and to safeguard validity.
Figure 6. Hypothesis of future publishing without the need of journals, reviewers,
editors and fees.
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36
6.1 The Fear of accepting reality and coping with technology advances
Plausibly, people are used to traditional modes of publishing and are still afraid of trusting non-
reviewed articles even though the evidence condemning such peer review practices is increasing
dramatically. Ultimately, embracing SPM with a pinch of caution is supported by several
advantages as summarized in Table 8.
SPM advantages Higher speed of knowledge transfer It is not prone to bias by reviewers (More democratic, the
whole community can referee) Manuscripts are original (Authors will not modulate their
manuscripts in order to satisfy editors’ demands) It is openly accessed worldwide There will be no fees required to either read or publish It can be investigated by authors and read worldwide
regardless of financial resources, standing and regulation There will be no fear of stealing ideas from peer reviewers
(since they are active competitors from the same field) It resembles traditional publishing by University Press, such
as Oxford University Press (OUP)
With the presence of the World Wide Web and its facilitations, publishing freely on the net could
herald a new era of the scientific communication, but also the throwback of the origin of
knowledge dissemination before the emergence of scientific journals, so the history could be
repeated but in a more universal way110
. Still, history of scientific dissemination should
encourage this approach: non-reviewed articles. Manuscripts of Hippocrates exist now
unchanged in the medical school on the island of Cos. Greece111
, Nicolaus Copernicus’
important book describing the new conception of the universe, heliocentric theory was not peer
reviewed, Isaac Newton’s Principia Mthematica, which was published in 1687, and Albert
Einstein’s Relativity paper, which was published in Annalen der Physik, also passed without
being refereed112
. Still, the crucial questions that may stem from these historical episodes are:
Table 8. Advantages of the Self-Publishing Model (SPM).
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37
o Does this kind of publishing lead to a “total chaos” in the scientific community and more
anarchy or will it be a solution for most problems related to traditional publishing
especially financial ones?
o Which alternative strategies could be applied in order to ensure the veracity of scientific
literature that is being published without refereeing?
Even though “publishing freely on the net” may represent a preferred approach, of course, there
will be cautions, and the quality of what is being published on the net should be maintained,
since web search engines do not discriminate between subscription-based articles or open access
articles from self-published articles, regardless of quality. As we saw in Chapter 4, the easiness
of gaming in impact factor alongside with its assessment of primarily the value of the journal,
not individual articles, has led to the invention of another metrics, which are related to authors
and articles themselves. In my opinion, those metrics can also be applied as an indicators of
impact in the SPM, such as the article download counts of full-text. Those “esteem factors”
could be divided to three categories; papers rating, authors rating and website rating.
Figure 7. Esteem factors categories.
Esteem factors
Paper rating
Website rating
Author rating
Number of access
Number of downloads
Citations (replaces traditional IF)
Thumps up and thumps down (replaces traditional reviewing)
Free text commentary
Number of papers of author
Number of followers
Number of citations of authors (replaces H-factors)
Thumps up and thumps down
Self Publishing Model (SPM)
38
1665 1987 2000 Future
Printed journals Electronic-journals Open access SPM ?
Social networking sites for scientists and researchers such as Academia.edu, Mendeley and
ResearchGate®
exist already and may be of use in order to provide such esteem factors. In other
words, although people are used to traditional publishing and scared to move a step forward into
the unknown, there are many safeguards which can be put in place, and considering the massive
benefit of such an approach. Scientists should prepare themselves for a new and innovative form
of rapid world-wide dissemination without the need of the “middleman.”
Figure 8. Timeline of scientific communication.
Self Publishing Model (SPM)
39
The context of discovery
The context of justification
The context of dissemination
7. Conclusions
History reveals that scientists usually focus only on two contexts, the context of discovery and
the context of justification. Recent developments in the field of publishing indicate, however,
that another context should be considered with the same importance in the scientific activity.
This is the context of dissemination. This idea stems from the following questions: What
happens to a discovery after it has been justified? Is a discovery considered a discovery if it is
kept private and not disseminated?
The rapid pace of modern science creates a need for a new mode of communication. In the
historical description of scientific communication (Chapter 3), I have shown that the evolution of
scientific communication has generally been slow. There was a time- lag between each stage,
beginning from the Gutenberg revolution in the 15th
Century to the foundation of scientific
societies in the 17th
Century and the invention of scientific journals as a formal way of scientific
communication.
As illustrated in the previous chapters, the technological impact on the process of dissemination
of knowledge is enormous and there is a direct and firm link between technological inventions
on the one side and scientific communication on the other. The digitalization of scientific
journals, for instance, has revolutionized scientific communication, a process which is reflected
by the open access movement in our generation.
Indeed, the advent of the open access movement has pushed scientific communication into a new
direction. It enables all scientists to participate in knowledge construction by the ease of access
to new scientific findings without being hindered by a “pay wall,” and open access movement
has increased visibility of scientific research dramatically.
Figure 9. Different contexts of the scientific activity.
Self Publishing Model (SPM)
40
A central feature of modern dissemination is money, i.e. the question “who pays?” Table 9
describes the differences on the financial level among the more traditional subscription-based
journals, alternative open access journals and double dipping journals.
Open access journals Subscription based
journals
Double-dipping
journals
Researchers
All researchers can
access freely without
subscription fees
Researchers in institutions
that can afford to pay the
subscription charges or in
Universities where libraries
have subscribed to these
journals
They could benefit if authors are able to pay APC*, thus their articles will be open access, or if their institutions or Universities‘ libraries have subscribed to these journals
Authors
Authors pay APC* from
their own money or from
funded institutions
Authors can publish
without paying
Authors still have the choice to publish without paying
APC*: Article Processing Charge
As illustrated in the table above, thumps are up and down in different places due to financial
reasons. Noticeably, journals that depend on subscription fees as a source of income have
attracted lesser numbers of readers, whilst the opposite is true for most open access journals.
Article Processing Charges (APCs), however, have formed an obstacle for many authors whom
Universities or institutions do not support in their research. In short, open access has removed the
fee for reading but has shifted the financial burden to the authors as a fee for writing (APCs).
Thus, not much has been gained, as money is still involved. In some ways, it also has to be, as
long as open access is a private “enterprise” and incurs costs, for instance, for the handling and
reviewing process. That is, one has to pay many people in the journal office, even if it is located
de facto in China or in India. Moreover, hybrid journals, which are also called “double dipping”
journals since they have two sources of income, i.e. subscription fees and Article Processing
Table 9. Differences on the financial level among different kinds of journals
Self Publishing Model (SPM)
41
Charges, have benefited researchers if their institutes have not subscribed to subscription-based
journals. Authors, however, still have the option to render their manuscripts open access by
paying fees.
In Chapter 4, two significant yet controversial practices of scientific publishing have been
defined. The first one is the peer review practice, which still is the cornerstone of scientific
communication and a synonym for quality. The second one is the impact factor, which is a
measure reflecting the importance of a journal and, supposedly, the manuscripts published there.
These two metrics are recently facing increased criticism and occupy a large place in
researchers’ debates. The impact factor, for instance, is prone to fraudulence and the peer review
practice is also losing its credibility. Those developments alongside with the inherent problems
of scientists in developing countries to publish in open access journals or access subscription
based journals are harbingers of the massive need to find an alternative way of publishing
suitable for the 21st Century.
The coming together of the above-mentioned criticism and the technological advances has
stimulated me to develop my hypothesis of a Self-Publishing Model (SPM) which may be seen
as the beginning of a new era of scientific communication. It appears to be more adequate to
disseminate modern science reliably, rapidly and without unnecessary bias, yet with the free and
democratic scrutiny of the entire scientific community wherever it may located.
Self Publishing Model (SPM)
42
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